Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Where you are born – what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own – stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”

— Jeanette Winterson

302. “As your lover describes you, so you are.”

— Jeanette Winterson

303. “I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”

— Jeanette Winterson

304. “It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.”

— Jeanette Winterson

305. “We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.”

— Jeanette Winterson

306. “Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

— Jeanette Winterson

307. “Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”

— Jeanette Winterson

308. “Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”

— Jeanette Winterson

309. “I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.”

— Jeanette Winterson

310. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.”

— Jeanette Winterson

311. “I’m a woman. And I’m a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn’t do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

312. “I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.”

— Jeanette Winterson

313. “I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

— Jeanette Winterson

314. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

315. “Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what’s in it until it’s too late!”

— Jeanette Winterson

316. “I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

317. “A character has a distinctive voice – you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you’re out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it’s the character speaking and not you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

318. “It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”

— Jeanette Winterson

319. “Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.”

— Jeanette Winterson

320. “Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”

— Jeanette Winterson

321. “You’ve got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I’m against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It’s frightening.”

— Jeanette Winterson

322. “As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”

— Jeanette Winterson

323. “To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.”

— Jeanette Winterson

324. “What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.”

— Jeanette Winterson

325. “The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.”

— Jeanette Winterson

326. “Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

327. “The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.”

— Jeanette Winterson

328. “Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

329. “My passion for her showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

— Jeanette Winterson

330. “Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”

— Jeanette Winterson

331. “The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

332. “It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.”

— Jeanette Winterson

333. “We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

334. “What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

335. “Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.”

— Jeanette Winterson

336. “Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.”

— Jeanette Winterson

337. “When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.”

— Jeanette Winterson

338. “I think therefore I am. Does that mean ‘I feel therefore I’m not’? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.”

— Jeanette Winterson

339. “I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

340. “If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.”

— Jeanette Winterson

341. “If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

342. “The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.”

— Jeanette Winterson

343. “Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.”

— Jeanette Winterson

344. “Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.”

— Jeanette Winterson

345. “And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

346. “Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it’s pain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

347. “When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

— Jeanette Winterson

348. “It is silence that most needs an answering – when I can no longer speak, hear me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

349. “I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn’t be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I’m a Hemingway man myself although I don’t believe it is right to hunt lions.”

— Jeanette Winterson

350. “If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”

— Jeanette Winterson